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If admen had souls, many would probably trade them for an opportunity every restaurateur already has: The ability to place an advertisement in every customer's hands just before they part with their money. Your menu gives you a unique advantage to direct your customers to spend in the ways that best suit your interests. Yet, if you're like most restaurant operators, you're blowing an opportunity to put your menu to work for you. It isn't enough just to have a menu, no matter how pretty it is: You have to make the most of it.
Doing so requires promotional strategies, painstakingly chosen wording, good, thoughtful design, and skilled use of typography.
Your menu is more than just a list of what comes out of the kitchen. A good menu is a tool, a showcase for the personality and virtues of your restaurant. It establishes a harmonious relationship with your patrons. It conveys your restaurant's personality quickly, and directly. Yet some menus swamp patrons with verbiage that does nothing more than satisfy the writer's ego or trumpet the chef's smugness for having accomplished something only other chefs can relate to.
A good menu works like a map, allowing easy navigation between hunger and satisfaction. If it's properly conceived, it leads customers along the path you want them to take, steering them to your most profitable or distinctive items. But on most menus, typographical naivete unconsciously encourages customers to make decisions by price instead of by dish; weak editorial skills have patrons overlooking the items they'd like to order; and unskilled writing makes the restaurant look as if it doesn't really understand the cuisine on which it stakes its reputation.
Follow these ten commandments of successful menu creation and your customers will find quickly items with the most appeal (and that you want them to see), give them a clear understanding of what those dishes are like, and make your restaurant look expert in what it does:
1. SPEAK PLAINLY.
Don't go overboard with obscure terminology, whether it's in English or the language of your cuisine. Don't be like a restaurant I know that tries to pass itself off...